If you’ve just arrived in college: Congratulations! Allow us to correct the fact that you’re already screwing around on the Internet instead of learning with some crib notes for the next four years.

Luke McKinney’s tips, with excerpts and some comments from me:

#7. Don’t Do Anything EasyIf you’ve signed up for a degree just because it’s “easy,” drop out and get a job.— Don’t coast.

#6. Choose a Subject You Care About… you have to care. You need either a love of the subject or a deep passion for getting paid later. Preferably both, but at least one.— You can be practical or idealistic, but you have a higher chance of succeeding if you care.

#5. Level Up Your Social LifeCollege is a social accelerator. Instead of dumping you in a city where everyone already has friends and automatically assumes strangers are hiding a knife, they take in a horde of brand new people at the same time, then stuff the place with societies whose sole function is to get people together based on shared interests. Join with as many as possible, and that applies to both societies and people.
— The possibilities are endless, and if you want to make a fresh start this is the time.

#4. Try Everything It will never be this easy again

#3. Take Up a Martial Art— The writer chose aikido because the instructor’s main objective seemed to be teaching students how to fall over without hurting themselves, a lesson that still comes in handy on nights out.

#2. Work Beyond the CourseCollege is practice for the real world. That’s the entire point. If you just sit on your ass and scrape by with the bare minimum required to continue, that’s what your life will be like. Courses aren’t about memorizing raw data — we have Google now — they’re about the ability to think and work and complete tasks. Anyone whining about professors not giving out the test questions is worse than missing the point.

#1. It’s Not About Getting a Degree, It’s About Becoming a Person
If even half of what you learn is in the classroom, you’re not doing things right.

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3 Responses to “‘7 Tips for Not Screwing Up College’”

Aikido is indeed a good choice. The falling skills (“ukemi”) are indeed valuable lifelong skills that almost everyone should get, and the approaches to avoiding harm are metaphorically useful even for those who never get a punch thrown at them. Some of the falling skills are also taught in judo and jiu jitsu, but the aikido forms seem to me to be of more use off the mat. Of course, I’m somewhat clumsy and trip over stairs or my own feet about once a year, so perhaps I need the falling skills more than graceful people.